NAIDOC week seems a fitting time to diverge a little from the normal themes of Blak and Black and have a peak into what was our culture prior to the…
Everywhere, people attach powerful emotions to the deaths of others and feel the need to dispose of the bodily remains of the dead in a suitable manner. In Australia, there…
Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong…
It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flower-like, or as a tree grows. It…
I am not pessimistic. I just see everything as it is. When one lives in a society that is essentially not free, it is the obligation of every thinking person…
Sydney: city of mystery, city of marvels. Sydney: its foreshores once teeming with Gadigal; now a captive city pregnant with memories, enveloped by memories of a Gadigal Atlantis. The traditional…
Last weekend I took a stroll through the Mesopotamia exhibition at the Melbourne Museum. While reading the commentary attached to a number of the artefacts I realised, in a profound…
Fragments from the Alfoxden Notebook There he would stand In the still covert of some [lonesome?] rock, Or gaze upon the moon until its light Fell like a strain of…
Blak and Black is saddened to hear of the passing of Yindjibarndi Elder Mr Ned Mayaringbungu Cheedy at the age of 105. Mr Cheedy was custodian of the Yindjibarndi stories…
While travelling the highways and byways of Queensland taking statements in support of my application to the United Nations alleging ongoing and systematic human rights violations against Australia’s Aboriginal and…
Complicity takes many forms, as discussed in posts by both Bakchos and me. Many believe that silent complicity is the least culpable, but to my mind if the silence enables…
This case arises from the petitioners’ claim that Azzam Rahim was detained, tortured, and killed by “the security forces of the Palestinian Authority” in late 1995, around the time the…
Crimes against humanity, torture, prolonged arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions -- all of those human rights norms are defined by actions. They're not defined by whether the perpetrator is a human…
Invaded by Indonesia in 1961, West Papua is the crisis on Australia’s doorstep. The conflict generated by the usurpation of the former Dutch protectorate is not recognized as anything other…
Little fly, Thy summer’s play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee? Or art not thou A man like me? For I dance And…
The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who…
The TNI under Suharto was seen as different from other armies because: Indonesian army sees itself as quite different from other armies in the world, because it was never created…
These feelings which we Cubans have already acquired will have to be shared by someday. Today it hurts us if a Cuban is hungry, if a Cuban has no doctor,…
…the threats we face are no longer from known enemies, nations that have fleets or missiles or bombers that we can see come to the United States, nations that can…
Former Kopassus commander Lt. Gen. (ret.) Prabowo Subianto (who was “forced to retire because of his involvement in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of democracy activists in early 1998”) has…